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Perfect Market, which markets solutions aimed to assist publishers in growing revenue from their online content, has secured $6 million in a Series C funding round led by Tribune Company.

Just to be clear, that’s the media giant that owns newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune alongside a number of television and radio stations and a range of online properties.

Perfect Market says it will use the funds to expand its efforts to market and deploy its solution to publishers of newspapers, magazines and websites.

Existing investors Trinity Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners and Idealab also participated in this round. The company’s initial financing round totaled $15.6 million and was closed in July 2008. I failed to find out when or how big the Series B round was.

Frankly, I’m also having a tough time figuring out what the company offers exactly, but here’s the pitch from their website:

Our proprietary technology solution better fulfills the needs of intent users – people who arrive at their sites through keyword searches seeking specific information – with exactly what they’re looking for in our customers’ online content. Optimized content with relevant ads generates higher click-through rates for advertisers, and dramatically more revenue for publishers and their ad network partners.

Sounds like they’re up against Google and a plethora of other companies in this field.

Tribune Company has apparently been using the solutions developed by Perfect Market, which was incubated by Idealab, on several of its web properties in 2009. Clearly, the media company appears to believe in the startup’s potential to compete in a crowded market: aside from the investment, Dan Kazan, Tribune’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Development, has joined the company’s Board of Directors.

Kobe Bryant: huge nerd . Granted, he’s probably the best basketball player since Michael Jordan—LeBron would really benefit from winning a ring or two—but if you’re traveling the country armed with a fully portable Xbox 360 and customized PSP, then yeah, you’re a huge nerd. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.

Continued here: 
Apparently the entire NBA consists of gamers

The New York Times Company has teamed up with RMG Networks to have some of its digital content displayed on part of the latter’s network of out-of-home screens. The partnership is said to bring NYTimes content to some 850 screens, located in district cafés and eateries in the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco markets.

The new initiative, dubbed “NYTimes.com Today”, will feature the latest news headlines, photos, and a selection of videos exclusively from NYTimes.com – along with advertising units – on the digital location-based network operated by RMG Networks.

There’s also a mobile aspect to the story, as viewers can head to NYT2day.com on their phones to receive a direct link to the NYTimes.com Today mobile site, featuring the full articles displayed on the – smaller -screens.

Let’s take a closer look at the NYT’s newest distribution partner.

RMG Networks is headquartered in San Francisco but has local offices in New York, Chicago and Beijing. The company was founded in 2006 under the name Danoo and boasts an undisclosed amount of funding from National CineMedia, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and DAG Ventures – all investors also have one or more representatives on its board.

The company says it’s capable of delivering digital content and advertising to over 60,000 video screens nationwide, enabling it to reach up to nearly 25 million viewers every month.

RMG Networks’ management team is comprised of Garry McGuire (CEO), previously Chairman of Icon Internet Ventures, and former executives from companies such as Yahoo, LevelVision, Screenvision and McKinsey & Co.

Back in July 2009, when the company was still named Danoo, it acquired IdeaCast and rebranded the combined entity RMG Networks.

(Image via Venturebeat)

As Foursquare makes deals with major media companies, competitor Loopt is continuing to partner with with content companies to offer fresh news and reviews of restaurants, bars, businesses and events. Loopt’s mobile apps incorporates local content, deals and reviews about restaurants, bars and events from Zagat, Citysearch, Bing, and most recently Mobile Spinach. Today, Loopt is announcing a partnership with Tasting Table, daily epicurean email about restaurants, bars, wine stores and cookshops in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington D.C.

Loopt users can find Tasting Table-approved restaurants and bars within Loopt Pulse on Loopt’s free mobile application. Tasting Table recommendations range from directions, menus, editorial insights, special offers, and more. Tasting Table’s editorial coverage is based on first-hand research from local editors who eat and live in the cities they cover. In addition to being able to “check into” the restaurant, Loopt users add their input and tips for other users interested in the same establishment.

With 3 million users, Loopt is continuing to innovate its platform to compete in a competitive space, where Facebook may be entering as well. The pioneer of the mobile social network is launching a new app called LooptCard, which lets mobile consumers tap into offers, coupons and discounts by checking-in to spots. Location-based deals are one part of the picture; with check-ins, advertising and even merchant reviews and listings all included as features.

Google has a funny little blog post today on the Gmail Blog. Apparently, they’ve decided to change the way they’re serving advertisements in Gmail. Why? They say it’s in the name of serving ads that are more relevant to users. But really, it’s fairly obvious that it’s about serving ads that will bring in more money.

In the example they give, Google says that if you previously read an email confirming a hotel in Chicago, and were served an ad about flights to Chicago in Gmail, you might see that same ad when you’re reading an email wishing you a happy birthday. The thought is that there wouldn’t be a good ad to serve you related to this birthday message. That’s probably not true — instead, it’s probably an ad with a much lower click rate (and CPC rate) that makes Google less money.

Here’s something else Google notes that’s interesting:

To show these ads, our systems don’t need to store any extra information — Gmail just picks a different recent email to match. The process is entirely automated: no humans are involved in selecting ads, and no email or personal information is shared with advertisers.

Since the beginning of Gmail and its AdSense contextual ads, there has been much concern that Google was reading all of your email to serve up the best ads. Google employees aren’t reading them, but their bots are, and now they’re going to start reading some older ones that you’re not even looking at as well, apparently.

Now, how exactly reading another unrelated email will serve up a more contextually relevant ad, I’m not sure. Actually, I am. In this Google equation, “relevancy” simply means “ad more likely to make us money.”

Chicago based Groupon, which was formerly known as ThePoint, has raised a hefty Series B financing – $30 million – from new investor Accel Partners and existing investor New Enterprise Associates. Accel’s Kevin Efrusy joins Groupon’s board of directors.

The company is going gangbusters. They offer users deep discounts on local deals – spas, sky diving lessons, hotels, restaurants, golf, whtaever. Discounts range from 40 of the normal price. If enough people buy into the offer, everyone gets the deal. If there aren’t enough people, no one gets the deal. Groupon collects payment and passes it on, minus their fee, to the business.

Example – 1,600 people in one day bought skydiving lessons in Chicago, says the company, getting a 44% discount on the $229 price. And the company making the offer normally sells just 6,000 lessons per year. They sacrificed some profit, but gos lots of new customers.

What makes the service so compelling is that people have an incentive to get their friends involved to make sure the minimum is hit. And Groupon makes it easy to spread the word about offers via Facebook and Twitter. Their user acquisition costs? zero.

Groupon generally takes 30% – 50% of the total price paid for the service, and they are on track, they say, to do $100 million in gross merchandise sales in 2010. They reached profitability in June 2009, just six months after launching the service.

Chicago launched first but the site now covers 26 cities and is adding a new one every week. They have 126 employees, more than half of which are sales staff finding new deals for users. The company has now raised about $35 million in aggregate, including an early angel round.

Think they deserve a Crunchie for best application or best new product in 2009? Vote for them here.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Several airlines have been offering Wifi for a while now. United Airlines wants to ensure that people are actually trying it out and so through the end of the year, you can get one free session if you create a new account with Aircell’s Gogo Inflight.

Read the original here:
United Airlines & Gogo offering try-before-you-buy in-flight Wifi promo

Strikeforce (UFC’s closest competitor here in the U.S.) promotes one of the bigger fights of the year tomorrow in Fedor vs. Brett Rogers. It takes place in Chicago, which explains why EA Sports just held a press conference there to reveal more details of its upcoming MMA game, entitled EA Sports MMA .

View original post here:
Strikeforce will be the ‘premier’ MMA league in EA Sports MMA

I’ve met a lot of expats in my time in China. Some decided to move during an Asian studies class in college. Others decided to move when they saw Mandarin-speaking colleagues getting a promotion over them at work. Still others may have promised a Chinese parent on his or her deathbed to return to the homeland.

For Chicago-native Brian Sloan, it was about the time he was being questioned by police for trafficking and dismembering human skulls.

Sloan seems normal. Even boring. I met him with some other Beijing entrepreneurs last week over hot pot and he refused to eat anything out of the spicy side of the pot. He has a slight build, non-descript features, and mousey brown hair. He even has a law degree from Penn State. But his life took a more interesting turn in 2004 or so when he started to scour antique shows and auctions for things he could sell for more money on eBay. What motivated him? “Making money,” he says. Not so much for the cash itself, but the chase, the deal and the challenge. Buying something undervalued—even weird— and figuring out who would highly value it.

Long story short: He starting to realize China was a treasure trove of things to buy low and sell high—among them, human skulls that he imported in a box marked “TOYS” and then boiled, cleaned, broken apart and screwed back together and detailed for medical students. A good skull would cost about $100 each and he could sell it for as high as $800. (What makes “a good skull”? Turns out it’s the number of teeth.)

It all went well until the day an eccentric Chicago puppeteer named JoJo Baby came by the house to buy some mannequins and saw some skulls boiling on the stove. He naturally assumed Sloan was a serial killer and called the cops. This YouTube video (also embedded below) pretty much says the rest. It bears noting, Sloan was never actually arrested or charged, although he still complains that he never got his “inventory” back from the mustachioed, gum-smacking Chicago brass who spent days trying to work him over Law-and-Order-style while TV satellite trucks camped out in front of his apartment.

Sloan moved to China soon after. It was considerably closer access to the things he was selling and, let’s just say after the skull incident, filled with more open-minded people. “In China, people respect what I do as a business,” he says. Which would be a boon in his next career move… making latex fetish-wear. (Link very NSFW.) And that’s where the Chinese supply chain magic came in. He was able to tailor nearly any outfit in any size and ship it at a healthy mark-up. Some outfits go as high as $800.

But even that pales next to his new business. How should I put this and still be a lady? The product is called “AutoBlow” and it has nothing to do with cars. Here’s the site. Warning: It’s very, very Not Safe For Work. (Yes, I’m spelling the letters out this time, just in case.)

Like a lot of entrepreneurs in China, Sloan is cagey about what I can and can’t say about how the operation works. That’s not because it’s illicit—it’s because it’s so incredibly lean, flexible and outsourced that he doesn’t benefit if competitors realize exactly what he’s pulled off business-wise. But suffice to say with a small army of employees peppered around the globe, Sloan—aka the “Kinky King of Beijing”—is looking at an incredibly profitable business that’s already generating more than $1 million in revenue and growing quickly. He’s exploited what each region does best: Romanians are his programmers and SEO, Indians and Brazilians do his Web design, and China does the manufacturing and fulfillment. He hired his whole staff without leaving his living room. His next act? Finding new products and following the same playbook.

My point here isn’t to write a salacious post about skulls and sex toys—as much as I enjoy watching Michael Arrington squirm. My point is that for all the talk about how much harder it is for a Westerner to do business in China, in a lot of industries there are far fewer barriers to entry than anywhere else I’ve seen in the world. And – huge 1.3 billion person domestic market aside—that’s what is making China such a Mecca for scrappy, pioneering entrepreneurs right now. You may find Sloan’s ventures distasteful, indeed he says his mother still changes the subject when friends ask what her son does for a living. But change the nature of what he’s selling and Sloan thinks just like any good entrepreneur pushing the boundaries in any pioneering market.

We like to think that outsourcing manufacturing to China or call centers to India revolutionized American business. But America hasn’t seen anything like the truly flattened, profitable, deconstructed and then ingeniously reconstructed businesses I’ve seen in China in the last few weeks.

People who say China is all about outsourcing the supply chain and not innovation have it backwards—the deconstructed supply chain is precisely what’s opened China up to a world of innovation. Imagine the way the Web democratized media and content and now apply the same ability to break a staid practice into Lego-like pieces to any physical hard goods industry whether its sex toys or iPods or pharmaceuticals.

We’ve only seen the first few innings of what this means for global business and smart entrepreneurs in China – whether expats or locals—have the advantage.

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Jason Fried of 37Signals has taken the stage at Y-Combinator’s Startup School this morning at UC Berkeley. I’m taking my notes below on his talk.

Fried has started off by talking about bootstrapping startups. Startups that bootstrap are more “money hungry” then companies that are funded. If you are a funded company, you generally have money to spend that investors encourage you to spend as well. If you’re a bootstrapped company, you’re hungry to make money.

Fried also talked about the art of making money. He mentioned that making money is like playing the piano. If you started playing piano at 5, you have a lot of time to practice playing piano to get better. If you want to be a good piano player, you start young, and you practice. Same goes with making money. It’s a skill and a talent. The more practice you have making money, the more successful you’ll be.

Fried also used an interested analogy to crack cocaine, comparing crack to funding. Crack is like funding, because it’s addictive. Investors want you to come back for money — they want you to be addicted to the money.

One of the major points Fried mentioned is picking the right price. You have to find the right price to sell your products to consumers. Customers will pay if it’s worth it. Don’t make products that aren’t useful for others — you have to have people using your product, and if they use it, charge for it.

Thing will go wrong as well. Be real and honest about your mistakes. Also, you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to be successful. Fried mentioned that 37Signals is based in Chicago, but they have employees all over the world. Location doesn’t matter to build great products. You’ll know if you have a great product if people use it.

Q: How do you know if your product is useful for a lot of people?
A:Build something you would use yourself. When you put stuff out for free everyone goes “ah, that’s cool.” Put a price on it, then you figure out if it’s really useful.

Q: Regarding virtual offices.
A: Need to find a good team. People who can work from their home a lot. We’re in touch all day using our tools, but you can put that away if you need to. You can’t put a ‘real’ office away like that. But some face time is essential sometimes. Should be the exception not the rule.

Q: Pricing?
A: First question is ‘would I pay for it?’ It’s a science. You have to worry about margins. Walmart doesn’t use 9s for their prices. They do 8. But for me, is it worth paying for. We have multiple tiers. Every price point is double, but you get more than twice as much in each tier.

Q: I’m a scientist, skeptical about luck.
A: I think luck plays a part somewhere. BUt I think for the most part make your own success. You can’t wait for something lucky to happen. Maybe timing/meeting right person is luck. I think it’s the kind thing to say, PC to say. But I think if you ask people honestly they won’t say that.

Q: How long did it take you from having idea to launching paid project?
A: We launched basecamp as a side project. We were a web design company at the time. We made it in a few months, then we put a price on it. Built it for ourselves, we needed it for ourselves. Hit $5k a month in about six weeks, has since increased. We don’t share exact rev numbers. Job wars made 1.5 mi. book material about a million. Advance from new book is handsome. We make millions in rev and profits. We did take one investment in 2006. We bootstrapped. We didn’t need the money (from Jeff Bezos). We did it for liquidity and someone like Jeff available, he’s built a business from scratch.

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